The use of distributed storage systems has grown in abundance over the past few years. These systems often use a chassis that house multiple storage drives, where data can be distributed across the various storage drives. Typically, a single built-in chassis computer or stand-alone computer or is used as an interface between the chassis (and accordingly each storage drive) and other network computers. This master computer generally coordinates read and write operations, and sometimes data recovery operations. However, if this master computer fails, then access to the storage drives may be drastically reduced, slowed, or even blocked to all of the drives of the chassis. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the invention has been made.